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Forum:MediaWiki:Sitenotice
The Sitenotice is that thing that is seen between the upper menu bar and the page title if you haven't dismissed it already. This seems to be a tool to allow admins to communicate to the community, both new and old, about things and provide links to important areas. Sitenotices on other wikis for examples, Halopedia, The Vault, Gearspedia, Stargate Wiki, and the World of Warcraft Wiki. Currently there we don't know what to add so looking for some input. I was thinking a link to the MoS and Community Guideline. That's all I got, so input. Lancer1289 05:34, August 20, 2010 (UTC) Comments Yeah, just to throw this out there, I support bringing back the site notice, I just am not sure what to put there. I know of a few things I don't think should be there, but that should come as a surprise to no one here! :P So yeah, we just need an idea of what to put here. MoS and Style Guide seem to work well enough, but any other suggestions would be welcome as well. SpartHawg948 06:31, August 20, 2010 (UTC) :Well... :I think we should first decide how we want to utilize the space. Help:Site Notice recommends against frequent changes to the site notice, and also recommends that it stay empty most of the time, only being used when there's something important to announce. It also recommends against putting links to news, policies, and help in this area, which greatly narrows our options (At least, if we want to heed the advice given by the help wiki). So the first question we have to answer is: Is there anything important to announce? (I don't think there is at the moment, but I'm not thinking too hard about it) :We also have to consider what qualifies as important in general, and for how long the notice should stay up. A new policy going into effect would qualify, I imagine. As would votes on important policies. Maybe even huge project undertakings (though I can't think of something that might be considered "huge", other than a hypothetical rewrite of, for instance, every single walkthrough or character article-- not that they need it, just saying). We might even use it as a countdown to the release of ME3 for about a week or whatever before that, since that'd be a pretty big deal. I'm sure there are more, but those are the things that pop into my head. As for the time-frame... I'd say roughly a week on most things, though for some things it could be extended or shortened depending on what we expect people to do in response to the site notice. :If we don't wish to use it as the help wiki recommends (I think all of the examples you linked just use it for general links, so lots of people seem to be ignoring it), ignore what I've written here. But in my opinion the advice on the help wiki is spot on. If we use it too much people will just ignore it. -- Dammej (talk) 06:40, August 20, 2010 (UTC) ::Actually, now that I think of it, I didn't like the idea of using it for the MoS and Community Guidelines earlier, so why did I say I do like that idea a few minutes ago? Geez, am I ever fickle! Anywho, if putting the links to those in the welcome messages doesn't do the trick, I can't see how also putting them in the site notice will either. Yeah, that's the reason I originally didn't like it! :P I have no objection to using the site notice though, certainly not just because wikia doesn't recommend using it all the time. They're not the boss of us! At least not on this sort of stuff. If something suitable can be figured out, cool. If not, whatever. Worst case, we can at least use it to post big things like the release of new games, books, comics, DLCs, etc. SpartHawg948 06:45, August 20, 2010 (UTC) Hey, got an idea for the sitenotice if we wanna use it. Stick up a link to the Narrated Codex project that I created recently to attract people to it. Not trying to toot my own horn or anything... I just figure it'd be less obnoxious than me sending out millions of posts on talk pages about it. An idea to consider at any rate... -- Dammej (talk) 02:12, September 2, 2010 (UTC) :The only thing which that is that very time we have a project we'd have to update the thing with the project(s) currently in progress. Again we really need to figure it out first. However since we haven't used it before, maybe we could use it for release dates for game packs, announcements of game packs, new books, comic books, etc. Throwing those out there. Lancer1289 02:41, September 2, 2010 (UTC) ::Yeah, that's been happening a lot lately too. I'm against any sort of regular updates to the sitenotice, because that will just train people to ignore it, defeating the purpose of that prime screen real-estate. Announcements for releases are cool I guess, but I'm just wondering if there are any other things besides those that it could be used for. I've suggested big projects and important policy discussions, but I can't really think of anything else. -- Dammej (talk) 02:49, September 2, 2010 (UTC) :::But big projects and important policy discussions are just the sort of thing that would lead to regular updates. Most policy discussions and projects are over in a matter of days, or weeks at most. As for releases of games and DLC and such, that's what we were using it for before, and people complained about it. SpartHawg948 02:58, September 2, 2010 (UTC) ::::Well, I guess by "big" I meant things that would take several weeks to implement. By my criteria, the Codex project I brought up earlier would be excluded, since that'll just be a few uploads and tweaks to a few pages. I brought it up prior to considering that its inclusion in the site notice would open the floodgates for other small projects to be included. I'm not sure if any "big" projects or policy discussions will ever exist, but that's the sort of things that I think would warrant a spot in the site notice. I'm thinking paradigm shifting changes that will affect pretty much everyone that visits the site. ::::I don't really know how to respond to the discussion about release announcements, as I wasn't here to see how it was used. I think an announcement that "hey this thing is coming out" is largely superfluous on a website that dedicates itself to Mass Effect. If someone is on the MEWiki, they probably already know about that cool new Mass Effect thing that's about to come out. I'm not really against its inclusion, but I do think that it'd be more fluff than anything else. -- Dammej (talk) 03:15, September 2, 2010 (UTC)